Archive for Bye Bye Blackbird

Bye Bye Blackbird

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on December 16, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve posted about Albert Ayler before, but the excuse for posting this remarkable track is that it is preceded by a rare recording  of him talking. It dates back to January 1963 and was recorded in Copenhagen; Ayler had relocated to Sweden in 1962 in the hope that he would find a freer artistic environment than was available in the USA at the time. In the spoken segment, he comes across as a very quiet and thoughtful young man and gives little hint of his troubled character, but his life was a constant struggle against depressive illness and critical disdain for his music. Especially moving is the phrase he utters at the end “One day, everything will be as it should be”. Sadly that wasn’t to be the case for him, and in 1970 he took his own life. The track is a standard tune, Bye Bye Blackbird, on which he uses his extraordinary saxophone tone to give voice to some of the pain he obviously couldn’t express in words.

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